Nature of the Man
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: Companion piece to Nature of the Machine. This time, it's from Sharon's POV.


**Nature of the Man**

_Timeline placement: end of season one, after Kobol's Last Gleaming, companion piece to Nature of the Machine_

_Rating: PG_

_Disclaimer: The Battlestar Galactica universe, and all that is in it, is not mine, but rather belongs to Glen Larson (in spirit), Ronald D. Moore, the Sci Fi Channel, NBC/Universal, SkyOne and everyone else who put up the brainpower or the cash to make it happen. This is a work of fiction based in that universe. No copyright infringement is intended. No money was made off this beast – please don't sue._

_And a big thank you to my betas: Alphawox and LeeinLimbo_

Sharon sat by the fire, staring into the flames, but not really seeing them. She absently massaged her left hand, which had fallen asleep at the wrist from the constant pressure of the sling. Her shoulder ached, but she barely noticed. The only thing she was aware of at that moment was the man who sat on a fallen log, weaving a stick back and forth around the fingers of his right hand – Helo. She felt his eyes on her.

"I can't trust you," he said. Even though she understood his lack of trust now, where before he had trusted her with his life, his words still cut, still made her bleed inside.

"I know, but that doesn't change how I feel." Not wanting to see the censure in his hazel eyes, she kept her own eyes locked on the design she had begun to trace in the dirt.

"How you _feel_?" He exploded to his feet, throwing the stick he had been toying with into the flames. "You're a frakking _machine_!"

His words hit her like a physical blow, but instead of causing pain, as had the quietly spoken statement of distrust, these angered her. She glared at him.

"Helo. I. Am not. A machine." His expression was mulish as she continued, desperate to break through the wall he had built between them. "Can a machine feel pain?" She struck her injured shoulder, where this man she loved had shot her. Tears that she was powerless to stop welled in her eyes, threatened to spill. "Can a machine care for someone? Can a machine…"

Sharon couldn't look at his stubborn denial of her any longer. She pulled her gaze from his handsome face, back to the dancing flames, returned to drawing aimless patterns in the dirt. "Can a machine get pregnant?" she whispered, neither knowing nor caring if he heard her. It wasn't as though he didn't know, hadn't stopped Kara from killing her because of it.

"Shut up." Helo took a step toward her and Sharon flinched. Harsh lines were etched into his face by anger and something else. Pain? "Just shut up! I don't want to hear anymore lies or…or half-truths."

Knowing what she had sacrificed to save this man's life, that she could no longer return to her own kind, caused Sharon Valerii more pain than she would ever let Helo see. She masked the pain with anger, not wanting to hand him yet another weapon with which to hurt her.

"You don't want to hear me because you know I'm as alive as you are," she shot back at him.

"You're a Cylon," he sneered.

"Yes. Yes, I am a Cylon." Sharon smoothed over the design she had traced and retraced, obliterating it. Her hand brushed against a stone the size of an egg; she picked it up, bounced it in her hand for a second. "But in a way, I'm as human as you are."

Helo snorted. "What? Deep down inside, where it counts? That's a laugh. You're…" Sharon watched the muscles in his square jaw work as he fought for just the right words. "You're just a bunch of circuitry and…and…and programming!"

She didn't realize that her fist had closed around the rock until the sting of multiple cuts from shattered stone reached her awareness. Blood welled from the cuts. It didn't matter.

"Look at my shoulder, Helo." She struck herself again. "Does this look like wires? Circuitry? And how is my so-called _programming_ any different from you learning how to be a…a _good man_ from your parents?"

"It just is," he mumbled, not looking at her.

"Oh, that's a good argument." How could he be so unyielding, this man who had been her defender for so many months? Who she had come to know so intimately, these last few weeks on Caprica?

"It's different because my parents never trained me for genocide!"

Sharon had a sudden flash of memory – of the man and woman who had raised her as their much-loved little girl after her own parents had been killed in a mining accident. But they hadn't raised her, had they? Those memories belonged to someone else, a different Sharon Valerii, another copy. She only borrowed them.

"Hey, kids, am I interrupting?" Kara Thrace, the inimitable Starbuck, came up the rise from the stream below camp, flipping water from her short blonde hair. She had gone down to the stream about half an hour ago to "wash off the stink of Cylon." Sharon hadn't taken offense, choosing to believe Starbuck had referred to the odor of the Cylon Raider in which she had arrived. Or perhaps to her fight with Six, and the blood and sweat that had come of their struggle over the Arrow of Apollo.

"No," Helo said, looking over at the senior pilot.

Sharon caught Helo's eyes, held them. "Yes," she said. They weren't finished with this, not by a long shot.

Helo remained stubbornly silent as he broke his gaze from Sharon, instead watching Kara as she pulled a cigar from her jacket pocket and bit off one end, spitting it toward the crackling fire. A shower of sparks was released when it landed.

Sharon stared into the blue and gold depths of the campfire, wondering how everything had gone so wrong. Not just here on Caprica, but with her whole frakking life. It seemed like it was only yesterday that she had been with her parents at temple, playing with a tiny toy Viper while they listened to the litany. Again, she had to remind herself that these were only borrowed memories, hastily uploaded from the Sharon Valerii who had actually lived them, who was, even now, aboard the Galactica—

Helo's voice broke into her reverie. "Why are you here?"

Sharon jumped, startled. "What?"

"Why are you here? Why haven't you gone back to your masters?" She watched as he crouched down on the opposite side of the campfire. He deliberately kept the leaping, dancing flames between them, pretending indifference to her even as he hid from her.

She shook her head, her tail of hair brushing feather-soft against her neck. Kara strolled over to the log Helo had previously abandoned. Sharon turned back toward Helo. "You just don't get it, do you?"

He poked his tongue into his left cheek. He had once told her he had fallen into the habit when he was a kid, whenever he wanted something to suck or chew on, but didn't have anything handy. The gesture now had the unfortunate effect of distracting her with the memories – her own, this time – of what that clever tongue could do.

"For whatever reason, they wanted me to get you pregnant. They got what they wanted." He sounded bitter.

"So, Boomer," Kara's voice broke in. The Viper pilot was reclined along the log, her cigar held in the fingers of her right hand as she spoke. "If a troop of toasters were to come across us right now, what would happen to you?" Sharon couldn't guess what the look in the other woman's brown eyes might mean, but it wasn't hostility.

"The same thing that would happen to you." She watched for Kara's reaction. "If they still have a use for me, I get to live. If they don't," she looked at Helo, "I die." Neither of her traveling companions gave her any indication of what they were thinking.

But then Kara's lips quirked into a small smile, not at all unfriendly. She dropped her eyes with a significant glance at Sharon's stomach. "Something tells me they'll have a use for you."

_Something tells me they'll have a use for you…_ Kara's words couldn't have been more true. Sharon laid a hand over the place Helo's child had only just begun to grow. She stared into the leaping flames. "Well, yeah, for the next few months, they probably will." Now it was her turn to sound bitter.

She felt Helo's eyes on her again as he asked, "So, why _are_ you still here?"

"Because her programming failed." Kara's matter-of-fact words startled Sharon, but, even more, they frightened her. Or rather, her own realization that Starbuck was absolutely correct frightened her.

"What?" Helo's tone was sharp.

"What?" Sharon asked simultaneously, her question not nearly as sharp as Helo's. She felt as though she had been caught in a deception, something she had not felt before, even when Helo had first realized that she was a Cylon. His enemy. She wanted to run, hide, make all the pain and the memories and the fear go away.

"Because her programming failed," Kara repeated, addressing Helo. She took a deep pull on her cigar. "They didn't factor in emotion." She exhaled a cloud of bluish-white smoke.

"Toasters don't have emotions." Helo's flat response stabbed Sharon through the heart and twisted. She had given up everything she knew for him…

"Gods, are all men so dense?" Kara sat up, rolled her eyes to the star-studded night sky. "That must have been some fun time, frakking a construct of metal and plastic."

"Shut up," Helo muttered. He stood and walked over to their cache of firewood, taking up a couple of pieces.

"Are you defending me?" Sharon asked Kara, shifting her weight from her wrist. She sat up, swung her legs in front of her. Crossing her legs at the ankles, she wrapped her arms around her knees. Resting her head on her knees, she watched Kara, ignoring Helo as much as she could.

Kara waited so long to answer that Sharon thought that she wasn't going to, but then she said, "Maybe…" Nothing more.

"Why?" Sharon pushed, needing an answer. She had to know if she had an ally – even if that ally was the last person she expected – or if she was truly alone. "Why would you defend me?"

Kara looked at her for a few seconds, her expression unreadable. "Because I've seen how interacting with humans can change _toasters_ like you." She shrugged and stuck the cigar between her teeth, still watching Sharon.

"Wait a minute." Helo's voice dragged her attention away from Kara. "There are bio-Cylons in the fleet?" He sounded stunned.

"Well, yeah," Kara snorted, pointing in Sharon's general direction with her cigar.

Sharon watched Helo. His jaw worked as he thought about the implications of what had just been said.

"You think Sharon…" His eyes met hers and then slid away. "You think the Boomer who returned to Galactica is a Cylon?"

"It makes a lot of things that have happened make sense."

Sharon saw understanding dawn in Helo's eyes, knew that Kara had lived with the knowledge of the "bio-Cylons" much longer than he, and had apparently come to some sort of acceptance.

How much should she tell them? What could she tell them without betraying everything she believed in? Had grown up believing?

For that matter, what did she believe?

The things Six wanted her to do, to be – the things the Cylons wanted from Helo – Sharon couldn't allow.

The conversation had continued without her. "—have been Cylons in the colonies for—" Helo broke off, looked at Sharon. She couldn't bear the pain in his eyes.

Without making a conscious decision, she said, "For years." She lifted her head from her knees. "There have been Cylons in the colonies for years."

Helo looked at her as though she might be something unpleasant that had stuck to the bottom of his boot. Something tore loose inside her.

"I tried to tell you, Helo." She felt the tears burn her eyes, but she couldn't seem to stop them. "God help me. I tried to tell you a lot of things, but you just wouldn't listen."

"I'm listening now."

"Are you?" She thought that maybe, maybe this time he wanted to listen.

"Just say whatever it is you want to say." His voice was harsh.

Still with no idea what she was going to say, Sharon began. "At the end of the first Cylon War—"

"The _first_ Cylon War?"

Kara said something Sharon didn't catch, but she was sure it was sarcastic. The other woman shifted her position on the fallen log, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees.

Sharon began again. "At the end of the first Cylon War, the Cylons took prisoners. Not many. Just a few people from each of the twelve colonies." People who either wouldn't be missed or whose disappearance could be easily rationalized, she reflected, tracking Helo's every move. "They'd already begun developing their plans for what's happening now."

"They?" Helo asked sharply, his eyes boring into her.

"They. We." Sharon swallowed hard, uncomfortable with his scrutiny. "I don't know where I belong in this anymore." She only knew where she wanted to be, but he didn't want anything to do with her now.

"Go on," Kara gently encouraged her. A quick glance her way told Sharon that, surprisingly, she was truly listening. This was a whole new experience – the mighty Kara Thrace paying rapt attention to a rook, something she wasn't so sure of with Helo, in spite of his words to the contrary a few minutes before.

Sharon nodded, took a deep breath, plunged ahead. "They cloned those prisoners. Once the clones passed puberty…" She paused, looked at Helo, knowing that what she was about to say would damn her in his eyes. She dared him to say something. "Once a clone passed puberty, a chip was placed in his or her brain that would control things like endorphins, adrenalin, heart rate." Among other things that she just wasn't ready to discuss right now.

"I guess that explains why you never seemed to get tired…" Helo's tone was merely conversational, a welcome respite from their earlier confrontation.

"Not all of the test subjects survived. Or were deemed suitable." She stared into the merrily dancing flames, confronted with another memory, this one of a dying Sharon Valerii. One who had gone through the implantation at the same time as she, but whose mind had been too fragile to accept the modifications. "They ended up with twelve successful models; one for each colony…"

"We've seen four of them," Kara observed.

Sharon lifted her gaze from the fire to look at the other pilot. "Four?"

Helo broke in before Kara had a chance to say anything more. "You," he said with a nod toward Sharon. She was grateful that there was no more hostility in his voice. "And that blonde bitch. What else?"

"Leoben Conoy and Aaron Doral," Kara replied with a puff of smoke.

"Doral?" Sharon recalled that Helo had known that model, had interacted with him on a limited basis. "The public relations guy on Galactica?"

"Yeah. After he was taken down the first time, frakker showed up again with a bomb." The fire sent sparks rising into the air. Kara took another puff at her cigar before she continued, an enigmatic expression on her face. "Leoben was seen at a munitions dump on Ragnor Anchorage." Sharon wondered about the use of his first name. "And then another copy was found on the Geminon Traveler. Other than Boomer, he's the only one I've had any meaningful conversation with." She shrugged.

"Gods." Helo scrubbed his hands through his hair; he sounded tired. "Does the Old Man know about this?"

"No," Kara said, "at least he didn't when I left."

"So what do we do? They need to know."

Sharon felt Kara's eyes on her. "What do we do?" she repeated, then looked back over at Helo. She studied him. "We go back to Galactica."

A shiver ran down Sharon's spine as she asked, "All three of us?"

Helo shook his head at that. "They'll kill her." Was that concern?

"What do you care?" she asked, fighting against an absurd surge of hope.

Before Helo could answer, Kara said, "They won't kill her." She smirked at Sharon as she expanded, "You know what the other models look like, don't you?"

"I…" She felt herself teetering on the edge of panic. It was true; Sharon _did_ know what the others looked like. Her eyes blinked rapidly and she broke out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of giving Kara or Helo descriptions. A buzzing in the back of her mind grew louder with each passing second.

Kara sat up straight, no longer as relaxed as she had seemed to be. "Why don't you answer, Boomer?"

"Enough," Helo said forcefully, standing. "No more talk. It's late." He brushed dirt from his uniform. "You two get some sleep. I'll take watch."

Kara seemed to glare at him when she asked, "Now _you're_ defending her?"

Helo looked from Sharon to Kara, and Sharon looked away, back into the depths of the flames, letting the light sear her eyes. She didn't want to hear anymore. She began to hum a tune that her mother had taught her. Her breathing and heart rate began to slow, approached normal.

Her mother. At least, she had always believed the woman was her mother – it occurred to her that it might even have been the original Sharon Valerii, taken by the Cylons from Arilon decades earlier. The buzzing in her head faded.

Lost in memories, Sharon barely noticed when the man she loved with all her heart and soul walked away.


End file.
